Stop telling me to Log back into the community for acces
I work with Peace and Freedom Party, on the California ballot, for socialism; Communist Party USA; Strike Debt; and I run for office -
As the colonized mass that we are, we the 99%, have to be indoctrinated to accept – no, to love our de facto enslavement… so we go to school - we go to what a 13yr old child explained is ‘free compulsory education’.
Numerous details of the oppression are mentioned in my response to the questionnaire. One of them is that we are all students and teachers all our lives. Yet the education commodity is snatched from us. This is the greatest sorrow, the alienation we endure – as we are compelled to hand over our babies, our children to the self-same institution we suffered through, and go off to make some money to pay the rent – or mortgage – and to buy the food and everything we make, that our Owners steal from us and force us to buy back at prices we can’t afford – or can’t well afford. We give up our lives in order to pay the rent.
We are not allowed to interact in the major content of our days regardless of age. Age segregation is one element of our oppression.
Another restraint – children go to school in order to be sorted out – who fails, who succeeds … failed - how splendid! casting a seven or 12 or 17-year-old child as failed.
Adults go to school and get failed as well.
Testing is not a friendly loving way to go about being together. It’s judgmental, as is church. Testing , instead, needs to become our experiences together finding that if we don’t do a thing right that people among whom we’re doing whatever it is offer us the right or the better way to do it.
We learn – and teach – tactics for advancing a way, a skill, an idea.
Yes reading and writing and arithmetic and music and all can be taught by fixing the porch steps playing the piano running around and playing with friends and going and doing something else.
The idea of segregating us all into grade classrooms fits the idea of segregating clumps of knowledge… you know geography history math arithmetic gym recess segregating these from each other so that they can be tested, so that they can give teachers a commodity to teach, tell how to answer questions on a test instead of live together, enjoy it, develop it as we go along. The so-called ‘subjects’ include each other.
The structure is austere – the school building – the separation so that a parent can’t just walk in and talk with their child – is the opposite of friendly and loving.
… but then that’s what school teaching is for - to make us available to serve our Owners and not expect kindness.
Reform doesn’t work it’s been being done for 150 years. Trying to reform something that cannot be reformed – it makes some people who are there at the right moment, who’ve found the resource to do it, into education specialists. So we have the Diane Ravitches, and the Johnathan Kohls and all.
It’s like economists. Economists try to make sense of capitalism.
It is another of the brutal structures, unkind to us all, in the service to make profit for our Owners.
